The company that installed them, NTT Docomo, Japan’s largest telecommunications company, said the wipes will be available until March 15, at which point you’ll be forced to clean your phone on your own time and hopefully not get sick. After all, “cell phones carry 10 times more bacteria than most toilet seats” — a man in Uganda even contracted Ebola after stealing one, according to Live Science.

NTT Docomo also provided a handy how-to video for using Japanese toilets and information about the wipes, which also include helpful information, like WiFi passwords. Sanitary, informative, and efficient, these wipes are what 2017 are all about.

When you go to an amusement part, and you’re surrounded by thousands of sweaty strangers, what do you want? Turkey leg? Dippin’ dots? The opportunity to see those sweaty strangers half-naked and wrapped in towel.

If you answered number three. congratualations, you’ve won the opportunity to buy a ticket to Beppu City’s “Spamusement Park.”

Beppu City, Japan is home to numerous hot springs, gushing out over 130,000 tons from the ground a year. “It’s the second largest amount of hater discharge in the world, and the largest in Japan,” according to Wikipedia. And now they’re looking to one up themselves.

No, not a spa for dogs, unfortunately. According to this video, Beppu City will construct an amusement park in the city, which combines the sweaty mess of the spa with the sweaty mess of the amusement park. As Beppu City Mayor Yasuhiro Nagano, if this video reaches 1 million views, they will begin the spamusment park initiative. The video now has over 2 million.

Imagine it: A roller coaster where you sit in a hot tub of water; a tea cups ride where you actually sit in a hot cup of water; a ferris wheel where you sit in a hot tub of water. Your steam dreams are about to come true.

Looks like that box of fish sticks in the back of your freezer is going to stay there.

Space World, a Japanese theme park, shutdown their ice skating rink attraction on Sunday, because as it turns out, most people don’t consider skating around dead fish to be a winter wonderland. The theme park froze 5,000 sea creatures into the floor of their skating rink, thinking that attendees would enjoy the challenge of navigating an ocean graveyard. Space World called it “Freezing Port.” We call it “A Nightmare.”

Freezing Port received a slew of complaints from visitors and animal rights organizations. One Facebook user said, “You have no soul.” While another simply, and more practically, said, “This is the worst attraction educationally.” Apparently, only a select few found Space World's Facebook advertisements with captions that read “I am d... d... drowning, s ... s... suffocating” funny and not horrifying.

CNN added the park will “unfreeze the skate rink to remove the fish, hold an ‘appropriate religious service,’ and then reuse them as fertilizer.” Cool.

So there you have it. Theme park buys locally-sourced seafood, freezes it into their skating rink, and holds memorial service for the fish after learned that people don’t like ice skating on dead fish. Welcome to Monday morning on Planet Earth.

Almost a week ago, Seven-year-old Yamato Tanooka was left on the side of the road near a "bear-infested" forest in Hokkaido, Japan. The search began after the missing boy dissapeared into the forest, thinking his parents had left him for good as punishment for throwing rocks at cars and visitors at a nearby park. Miraculously, this little boy was found ALIVE and relatively unharmed after six nights alone in the forest.

Yamato managed to survive in the forest for so long after stumbling upon a hut used during training for the Japanese military. He did not have any food or heating but he did manage to keep warm by sleeping between two mattresses. He also had access to clean water nearby. For now, he's being kept for observation under a doctors orders but seems to be doing fine. This event has sparked debate over where normal parental punishment can cross the line into abuse with most people on social media condemning his parents for leaving him.

The Running Christmas Tree is the latest revolutionary wearable device to have been developed by Tokyo-based inventor Joseph Tame.
This mobile seasonal illumination device has been designed to disrupt the illumination industry by allowing for on-demand illumination - simply pull out your phone and summon the Christmas tree anytime, anywhere, and Joseph will head in your direction to bring some light into your life.
Featuring over 1500 LEDs, 9 mico-controlers and 100 batteries, this 25kg / 2.5metre tree is unlike anything seen before, and has been a huge hit on the streets of Tokyo where the service was first rolled out.
Full information on the tree and links to book it for yourself can be found a: http://tokyoxmas.org

Likewise, the offer is for a limited time only. It's available only in Niigata Prefecture and part of a promotional tie-up with the the newly launched pop group NGT48, the Niigata-based spin-off of the massively popular idol unit AKB48. The groups tend to have around 48 members (sometimes more, sometimes less), divided up into different teams. That's a lot of idols. That's okay, this is a lot of nuggets. Forty-eight nuggets is surely a whole chicken, no? Fifty has to be.

A rare photo of Hachiko, the Japanese Akita dog know as the "World's Most Loyal Dog," has emerged 80 years after his death.

The story of Hachiko and his owner Uneo dates back to 1920's Tokyo, where it is said Hachiko would wait every day at the train station for Uneo to arrive back home from work.

This happened every day, until 1925 when Uneo unexpectedly died while at work.

Hachiko couldn't understand that his owner had died, so he stood watch at the train station for 10 years until his death in 1935.

Most photos of Hachiko (like the one above) only show him standing alone, but the new photo shows his surroundings.

The photo shows the dog blending in naturally at the station, and is totally different from other memorial and closeup photos.

When Hachiko is pictured alone, the environment around the dog is unclear. Almost all shots of the dog with people were taken as memorial photos.

The photo found recently was taken around 1934 by the late Isamu Yamamoto, a former bank employee who lived in the Sarugakucho district in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo. That year, the first statue of the dog was erected in front of the station and Hachiko attracted public attention as a faithful dog.

Hidekichi Miyazaki, dubbed "Golden Bolt" after the fastest man on the planet, clocked 42.22 seconds in Kyoto to set a world record in the 100-meter dash for the over-105 age category — which had been nonexistent — a day after his birthday.

"I'm not happy with the time," the pint-size Miyazaki said in an interview after catching his wind. "I started shedding tears during the race because I was going so slowly. Perhaps I'm getting old!"

Indeed, so leisurely was his pace that Bolt could have run his world record of 9.58 seconds four times, or practically completed a 400-meter race — a fact not lost on Miyazaki.

...Asked about Bolt's latest heroics at the IAAF World Championships last month in Beijing, Miyazaki screwed up his nose and said with a chuckle: "He hasn't raced me yet!"

The twinkle-toed Miyazaki, who holds the 100-meter record for centenarians at 29.83 seconds, insisted there was still time for a dream race against the giant Jamaican.

Miyazaki said he thought he could get his time down to 35 seconds and we believe him.

The 1,592-metre (5,222ft) high Mount Aso is one of the most active peaks in Japan but also a popular hiking spot. There were a handful of people at a parking lot near the peak but they were being evacuated safely, officials said on Monday. They said the eruption had come without warning.

The Guardian was also kind enough to provide a handy map so you know where this happened:

Here's a video of dat ash:

There is a nearby nuclear plant, but officials have said that it remains unaffected by the surprise eruption.

On Aug. 9, the official Japanese Twitter account for Disney tweeted out the following message to its 277,000 followers:

According to Kotaku the Japanese at the top reads "Congrats on a trifling day" before the Alice in Wonderland message.

Well, you see, Aug. 9 was also the 70th anniversary of the World War II atomic bombing of Nagasaki. In that event, according to Wikipedia, "roughly 39,000–80,000 people were killed. About half of these died immediately, while the other half suffered lingering deaths."

Not exactly a "trifling day" for the country who marked the occasion with solemn ceremonies, commemorating all of those 'unbirthdays'.

Aug. 6 is the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, in which some 70,000-80,000 people died.

As Kotaku says:

My Game News points out that Disney Japan's Twitter account typically does not post messages like this (instead, the tweets are typically PR, introducing movies, TV shows, events or products), making these questionable tweets stand out even more. Why were these dates selected, people wondered.

Disney Japan has since apologized for the tweet and deleted it off of its account.

The Associate Press is reporting that North Korea has decided to set up its own time zone. The official time, as announced by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), will be half an hour earlier than it currently is and it appears that the reason for this change is just to mess with Japan.

The new time zone will take effect Aug. 15 — the 70th anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese rule at the end of World War II, North Korea's official Central News Agency said Friday. The establishment of "Pyongyang time" will root out that legacy, it said.

Local time in North and South Korea and Japan is the same — nine hours ahead of GMT. It was set during Japan's rule over what was single Korea from 1910 to 1945.

"The wicked Japanese imperialists committed such unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its standard time while mercilessly trampling down its land with 5,000-year-long history and culture and pursuing the unheard-of policy of obliterating the Korean nation," the KCNA dispatch said.

When America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, a great many things were destroyed in the devastating blast but some survived it to this day.

Marking the 70th anniversary of the bombing Aug. 6, the United States government will also honor the survival of a white pine bonsai tree that managed to live through it.

Housed in the National Arboretum in Northeast Washington D.C., no one guessed about the tree's significance until 2001.

The tree, donated by a bonsai master named Masaru Yamaki, was part of a 53-specimen gift to the United States for its 1976 bicentennial. Little was known about the tree until March 8, 2001, when — with no advance notice — two brothers visiting from Japan showed up at the museum to check on their grandfather's tree.

Ensuring the continued survival of such an important piece of the collection is no easy task. It falls to Jack Sustic, who has been the curator of the Bonsai and Penjing Museum since 2002.

Bonsai, Sustic said, refers not to the type of tree but rather the manner in which it is cared for. It is the blending of nature and art, he said.

On Aug. 6, 1945, a 9,700-pound bomb exploded over the city at 8:15 a.m. A walled nursery belonging to the Yamakis was less than two miles from the site of the bomb blast, but the ancient tree, Sustic said, was just far enough away to survive.

"Location, location, location," Sustic said. "It was up against a wall. It must have been the wall that shielded it from the blast."

As we say, the lovely little things have been crawling their way across the international Twittersphere. Unfortunately, we don't read Japanese, but we can assume these admirers are big fans of the bunny slugs.